atharris

5 ms·

1.
by atharris 6y ago
This is really meat-dependent, ironically - the biggest thing we could do is cut consumption of steak and other prime cuts of beef, since ground beef is made out of what's left after those expensive, sought-after cuts are taken. I woul
2.
by atharris 6y ago
I've said this elsewhere in the thread, but stabilizing a dynamically unstable system is half of the reason why control theory remains an active research area instead of a mathematical backwater; this kind of set up is extremely common
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by atharris 6y ago
A caveat here is that the modern FAA is very different than the FAA of even 20 years ago. In response to decades of stagnant funding, 'the beast' is fundamentally unable to fill the same regulatory role it was intended to do - to
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by atharris 6y ago
I don't think the flight safety record of the MD-11 bears that out[0] - most crashes of significance were either cargo flights (which are much more prone to dynamical issues than passenger flights) or flights in conditions that exceede
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by atharris 6y ago
Ah - I didn't say Boeing's ability to write and test that control software was particularly good (in fact, I think their current track record says exactly the opposite.) I just hate when non-domain experts make judgements about th
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by atharris 6y ago
Aerospace controls engineer here - while the airframe might not be passively stable (as is common for civilian aircraft), dynamically unstable aircraft have been stabilized with control software since the 70s [0]. If you've flown on an
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by atharris 6y ago
Okay? This sounds like a great trade if your goal is to have a representative government instead of minority rule.
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by atharris 6y ago
As a corollary - how many people already spread inaccurate or misleading video clips, sound bites, etc without this technology, and how many already refuse to believe real ones produced by the 'lying news media?' I think the hyste
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by atharris 6y ago
I like this idea, and I think the research has backed it for decades - I wrote a letter to my Senator, Hillary Clinton, in support of later school starts back in middle school that cited such work. I think it hasn't happened for two re
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by atharris 6y ago
It's been stated elsewhere in this thread, but there really are a lot of practical, well-understood engineering issues with Elon's proposals that he refuses to admit or deal with. Here's a somewhat humorous review of his clai
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by atharris 6y ago
I agree with most of this, except for the unexpected rapid-response examples you list - I would expect an autonomous collision-avoidance system to react faster than a human being when faced with a deer in the road or someone running a light
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by atharris 6y ago
The rest of the world is rife with small, rural towns that nevertheless have great public transit systems, or at least ones that are more effective than what we see in the US. The major difference is that these places are willing to invest
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by atharris 6y ago
To be clear, there are about ~15,000 objects (active + debris) in orbit ranging from small debris chunks to active spacecraft. Starlink alone is expected to add ~30,000 active satellites with relatively large solar panels/bodies, which
14.
by atharris 6y ago
This is definitely the largest drawback of Linux in general - support for peripherals and common communication/presentation software is really lacking. If I had a dollar for every time I had to muck around to get my headphones to work
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by atharris 6y ago
The core question is, 'what's the use of space anyways?' Orbits have two nice properties - they're high up, so you can see lots of stuff, and they're reasonably stationary with respect to the rotation of the earth,
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by atharris 6y ago
This is very pessimistic - basically every space-faring nation now has pretty strict licensing requirements for new spacecraft, a portion of which is a plan to deorbit / move to a 'junkyard orbit.' In the US, this is actually